5,300 Congolese Dead and Counting While Armed Groups Block Ebola Care

Nearly 11,000 Congolese have been infected with Ebola. More than 5,300 are dead. And the official numbers are the floor, not the ceiling. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, the largest and deadliest Ebola outbreak in the country's history is unfolding in a place where the state has been losing ground for years, and where the people sent to fight the virus are being shot at, threatened, and driven from their own communities.

Let us be clear about what we are looking at. This is not only a disease story. It is a governance story, a security story, and a story about who we choose to protect when the bodies start piling up. Ask yourself what it means when a father is buried, and the funeral itself becomes the place where the virus spreads to his son, his wife, and his neighbours. Ask what kind of system allows that to happen twice.

The outbreak is caused by the Bundibugyo strain of the virus, which kills roughly half the people it infects. There is no licensed vaccine for it. The vaccines that have protected people against other Ebola strains do not work here. Responders are fighting a killer with the tools of an earlier era: isolation, protective equipment, and luck. Some of the people doing that work are Congolese doctors who survived the disease and went back into the wards anyway. One of them, Dr Sylvain Radjabu Lubangi, works with Médecins Sans Frontières in Bunia, Ituri province. He entered the high-risk red zone every day after he himself had been infected. Think about that courage, and then think about how little the system around him has offered in return.

The toll on the people who serve is staggering. Among the 2,900 staff working for or financially supported by MSF, 29 were infected and three died. Across the country, hundreds of frontline responders have been infected and dozens have died, according to official figures. Samson Balidja, an Ituri native who advises MSF's mission leadership, has been threatened and physically attacked. He was told his team would not leave the province alive. In a region where around a dozen armed groups operate, responders cannot always reach the sick. Clashes send families fleeing in every direction, and the chains of transmission multiply in the chaos.

Ituri is not an abstraction on a map. It is where armed groups have spent years terrorising civilians, and where the state has too often been absent or complicit. When an ambulance driver like Richard Kasereka arrives at a home and finds a patient already dead, the question is not only medical. It is political. Why did the first call come so late? Why did the community not trust the people sent to help? And why did it take months for the world to treat this as the emergency it is?

Further south and east, the picture is darker still. The war that the M23 movement has waged in North Kivu and South Kivu has already displaced millions and dismantled much of the health infrastructure those provinces once had. UN Group of Experts reporting, including S/2025/446, has documented Rwanda Defence Force units fighting alongside M23 in what is, in substance, a cross-border war of aggression. Every soldier deployed to kill Congolese civilians is a soldier not building clinics, not training nurses, and not stockpiling oxygen. Rwanda's own health gains are real, and we should say so. They do not give Kigali a license to invade its neighbour. A government that can run a clean health system at home can also choose not to burn the health systems of others.

Africa has seen this movie before, and it has also seen the better ending. In 2014, Nigeria faced an Ebola outbreak that could have become a catastrophe in Lagos, a megacity of many millions. Instead, the government moved fast, tracked every contact, funded responders properly, and communicated openly with the public. The outbreak was contained, and Nigeria was declared free of Ebola within months. Uganda did something similar in 2022 with a different strain, bringing its outbreak under control through disciplined contact tracing and community engagement. Neither success came from slogans. Both came from strong institutions, transparent data, and leaders who answered to their citizens.

So here is what must happen. The Democratic Republic of Congo's government must publish its outbreak data in full, including deaths outside treatment centres, and allow independent audits of its figures. It must ring-fence Ebola funding so that money cannot disappear into the same patronage networks that have bled the state for decades. It must pay responders on time, provide death and disability benefits to the families of those who die, and punish anyone who attacks health workers. The African Union's Peace and Security Council should demand humanitarian corridors in Ituri and North Kivu, with clear accountability for any armed group that blocks them. The UN Security Council should stop issuing statements and start enforcing sanctions against commanders who obstruct care and against any foreign state whose forces are fighting on Congolese soil. Regional and international partners should fund urgent research into treatments and vaccines for the Bundibugyo strain, because a continent that waits for cures to be developed in other people's labs is a continent that will keep burying its own.

And citizens have a role too. Congolese civil society, faith leaders, and community organisations should keep pressure on their own government, demanding transparency and protection for the people who risk their lives. Those of us across the continent, in Lagos, Nairobi, Johannesburg, and Accra, should refuse to let this become one more forgotten African crisis. Share the numbers. Name the failures. Ask your own leaders what they are doing to support the Congolese response, and what they are doing to stop the wars that make it so much harder.

Do not let the phrase "largest outbreak in history" become a number you scroll past. Behind every figure is a child who seemed fine in the morning, a family that lost half its members, and a doctor who went back in after surviving. They did not choose this. We can still choose what happens next.

Based on reporting by RELIEFWEB